This West Lawther Drive home in Dallas, known as Mount Vernon, is on the market for $19 million. It has 10,511 square feet, five bedrooms and nine baths. Built in 1929, the historic home of Texas oilman H.L. Hunt has a two-story guesthouse, a private bowling alley and a 16-car garage overlooking White Rock Lake. See our photo gallery

REAL ESTATE

Million-dollar market

Sales of homes priced at $1 million and up are surging in North Texas as affluent buyers decide it’s time to hunt for new digs

Atight supply of homes on the market and tougher mortgage standards have kept Dallas-Fort Worth home sales in check so far in 2014. But that hasn’t put the brakes on high-end home purchases, which have surged in the first two months of the year.

Sales of homes priced at $1 million and more have exploded – up 53 percent in North Texas from a year ago, according to the latest real estate data.

At the same time, sales of modestly priced houses in the area have slowed – down by more than a quarter from a year ago. Overall pre-owned home sales by real estate agents are flat this year.

More than 100 North Texas houses priced at $1 million have changed hands since the start of 2014.

And there are another 857 homes in that price range still on the market, according to data from the Real Estate Center at Texas A&M University and the North Texas Real Estate Information Systems.

The surge in high-priced home sales has caught the attention of economists and kept real estate agents busy.

“We seeing the same thing in Houston as in Dallas – million-dollar home sales are way up,” said Dr. James Gaines, an economist with the Real Estate Center at Texas A&M. “We are in a housing recovery, and people with money recover faster than people without money.”